


Pointless Rituals

by Clementine19



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: Established Friendship, F/M, Female Reader, Not beta'd we die like men, ellie's a little shit and knows plenty, fluff/love epiphany but make it vaguely angsty, rating for future chapters, tumblr ask, wedding dress but subvert it a little bit i guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:54:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26455969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementine19/pseuds/Clementine19
Summary: rating is forward looking, first chapter from thisask, copied here~(slight liberty taken with request for reader to get excited about the shop; Ellie's working through sixteen-year-old, new-to-commitment-as-a-concept with Cat, pre-dina tattoo girlfriend, so i went with that)Joel, y/n, and Ellie are all out on patrol and come across a small town. In the town, there’s an abandoned wedding dress shop. Y/n gets all excited and goes inside to see there are untouched wedding dresses. Joel’s slightly annoyed when y/n and Ellie want to try some on for fun. But then he sees y/n in a wedding dress and realizes he sees her as more than a friend.
Relationships: Joel (The Last of Us)/Reader
Comments: 6
Kudos: 47





	Pointless Rituals

**Author's Note:**

> yeah, of course I wrote with reference images up:
> 
> [texture/sheerness/skirt shape/front dress ref](https://www.galialahav.com/bridal/gala/collection-no-viii/g-301/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=pinterest&utm_campaign=tailwind_tribes&utm_content=tribes&utm_term=1020437562_46918330_370025)  
>    
> [back of dress ref, specifically the window-back with the little covered buttons up over the lower part of the hips](https://www.essensedesigns.com/stella-york/wedding-dresses/6731/)
> 
> [I evade y/n as a convention like the plague, it’s really immersion crushing for me. However, I’ll edit it for your OC’s name if you hit the ask box, so.] 
> 
> There's already a second chapter if you we want to get into this, comment or kudos and I'll get brave!

Ellie grimaces, scrunching her whole face. She looks across the main street of the town you’d come to scout out, Joel taciturn on his horse a few yards away, scanning storefronts and alleys.

“What?” you jerk your head to her sightline and back at her, unholstering your revolver on reflex. Your horse snuffles below you, hoofing at the ground. You can never tell if the creature is clueless, indifferent, or confident in his rider, but he would certainly be perturbed if there were infected.

“Dude, people had whole shops just for weddings?” Ellie asks, snorting derisively.

You follow her extended arm to the storefront she points to, a frilly off-white dress draped over a sunken model, glass from the smashed display window embedded.

“I mean, you had to have seen them in Boston, plenty of bored people with money,” you supply warmly. You’d grown up there, a cataclysm between the city you’d known and Ellie’s birthplace. Weddings were for people who’d given up, who’d aged out of chasing their dreams, settled into dull domesticity. People, usually the woman-coded partner, whose parents had quarter of a million to drop on a party with lifelong implications.

You’d been a little relieved when social ritual had been mostly taken off the table by the apocalypse, so the wedding pressure never reached you. Hadn’t thought about the concept in years.

You wondered who in Victor, Idaho, just over the border from Jackson, had kept a bridal shop open even before the outbreak. The demand just _couldn’t_ match thousands of dollars of dress.

“Oh, no,” Ellie said softly.

“Well, it was a whole thing. Get some champagne, drag a bunch of girls with you, try on all the shapes and get yelled at by your mom, make jokes about the wedding night. Mostly pointless rituals,” you explain.

“You ever go to one?” Ellie asks.

“I mean, I was my cousin’s bridesmaid, so I got drunk in one and shoved into a blue satin thing, if that counts,” you clarify, shifting in your saddle.

Ellie nudges Shimmer forward, Joel drawing up to your position with a helpless shrug to you.

“It was strange. Were you in Jackson for Tommy’s?” you ask. Maria and Tommy still have that thing where they see each other and tune everything else out, even for a beat, seeming like every sense recognizes the other, no matter what else they’re doing. It feels so belligerently _normal_ , and you watch the younger couples in the town taking note to emulate it, like they knew what they were doing because they were born before.

“No,” Joel says, looking wistful. “Seen pictures,” he adds.

“Imagine they were a bigger deal in Texas,” you say, your horses trotting a few paces behind Ellie.

Joel looks at you, face cycling through the decision to keep speaking, the same circuit you always saw him loop before he bit down on a memory and fell silent. You let the afterimage of a smile cross your face before looking down, feeling like he needs the same privacy he’d proven skilled at respecting in your own expression.

— _Yesterday—_

“Ask you a favor?” you feel your bones leave your body and slam back into place with fear, registering Joel’s low drawl. You’d groggily found your way into the stables to start patrol, hoodie tucked over a beanie, praying not to be seen. Nobody was supposed to be awake this early—you were avoiding a less experienced, loquacious patrolmate you’d been sentenced to and your throat clasps around itself to find that the previous night’s team, Joel’s, was only just returning.

“How bad was it?” you tip your head at the blood spatter on the side of his jacket, reddened bucket and sponge set where he’d been cleaning the infected byproduct off of his horse.

“Oh, I straggled, rest gone home. Patrol route’s quiet now, though,” he non-explains. You’re not sure if he’s trying to keep his voice low out of respect for the early hour or if that’s just his usual rumbling tone resounding it in the stark, chilly air.

“Mhm. What’s the favor?” you ask, busying yourself with saddling your own horse. 

“About scouting that town for the group to search, tomorrow. Ellie’s comin’ and…” he trails off, looking at the wood-plank wall, blinking an eye at the fierce early morning sun beaming through a sliver.

You’ve learned not to rush him, learned he’s easier to talk to with his hands full, and he finishes scrubbing off his horse’s bridle while you tack up your own.

“She talks to you, easier,” Joel admits, face obscured behind his horse, taking his time to brush through the animal’s fur, obliviously slurping hay into its mouth before crinkling it in its teeth.

“Huh?” you ask, marvel of articulation that you are.

“Ellie, she’s more talkative,” he repeats himself.

“No, I mean, what?”

You hear a sigh and he leans around his horse, hands on his hips.

“Please?” he asks, slightest edge of irritation at having to say more than he’d practiced. It's all insecurity, not directed at you, but you bristle anyway. 

“Alright. It’s your business, but I’ll lend my girl talk instinct,” you prod with bite, stuffing your foot into a stirrup and swinging a leg up onto Clover, who’d been named before you got to Jackson. Your emotional labor threshold never existed, and Joel was fucking pushing it.

“That’s not what I meant,” he sounds defeated as you look down at him, Clover slowing helpfully. His eyes look full, and you peer at him. He looks a little vulnerable—even if your worst anxieties read it as him noticing that you squint to avoid looking at his mouth—which is parted a little, black beard flecked with, for you, exactly the correct amount of grey. Joel rubs his lips together three times, quick, the way you’d seen when he wanted to stop talking at town meetings, shy of the eyes on him.

You soften, aware you’re irritable from lack of sleep and scarcity of good caffeine. You look ahead, reins creaking in your gloves conspicuously in the still space.

“Owe me a beer when I’m back tonight, okay?” you nod at him and press into Clover’s flank as Joel silently assents, focus snapping back to brushing out his horse. You risk looking back as Clover picks up, relieved and let down to see Joel doggedly focused on his task. You’d taken to drinking with the other patrolmen in the Tipsy Bison, edging into something resembling a social life borne of something like mutual responsibility. The group repeatedly made plain his welcome over the last few months until Joel had started to show up routinely, even murmuring a few words here and there, coming to the point that you’d notice when he wasn’t there.

—

“Okay but, why, though?” Ellie paws at a veil as you enter the store, pompous fabric ballooning halfway down the mannequin’s back.

“Dunno, it’s what people wore. I think that was for modesty, symbolically. Only went to a couple. My friends never hit the ‘wedding season’ stride. Too young,” you explain, your senior year of college on outbreak day. A look crosses Joel’s face and he spins the barrel of his revolver, leaning against the counter, trying to look busy checking the register, just in case something helpful lingered.

“Go try one on, Ellie,” you try, unsure what the sixteen-year-old is working through. Her attention hasn’t drifted to the next shops to explore, yet, so it clearly matters.

“Not for me,” she protests, hands raised. “Will you?”

You laugh ruefully, years away from the last time you’d put on something close to a dress, much less something formal, and you'd certainly never thought about being a bride. Not materially. 

“C’mon, I’ve never seen like, a normal human in one,” Ellie pouts. You narrow your eyes for a second, lightly dubious.

“That’s not the best idea,” Joel grouses next to you, looking over both his shoulders like he was expecting an ambush even though it had been placid the whole way up here. Two of your three horses nudge each other for space near the tree you’ve secured them too, whinnying.

“I’ll keep my boots on for running. And you’ll keep a lookout,” you reply blithely, rolling your eyes at him.

“Yell for help!’ Ellie still discovering nuptial detritus she’d seen alluded to in comics at most.

You busy yourself finding something not set through with rot, moving towards the back of the store. Ellie swings open a display case and picks up a circular, springy fabric, a pale blue garter, squinting with the effort of discernment.

“Were the hair tie things a thing for a reason?” Ellie asks Joel, looping the blue-ribboned elastic around her wrist for later. Joel’s eyes widen in horror, ready to run towards the nearest infected to avoid explaining the whole garter thing to Ellie.

A second, more frigid wave hits him, remembering his own wedding day, Tommy helping him get just drunk enough to go through with the embarrassing ritual that complemented the bouquet toss. Sarah’s mom had loved all the stupid little wedding-day-things, though, so he’d accepted the shot(s) his brother snuck him and was grateful his red face would be under a skirt. He’d barely been eighteen, doing the right thing with Sarah’s mom pregnant, and two-years-younger Tommy held it together for him the whole day. He thought of not being here for the day his little brother had gotten hitched, a candid Polaroid in focus in the reel of guilt he’d built for himself these last twenty-some years. Tommy looked like his brother as he was before in it, looking up Maria with rapt awe as he accepted her hand to be led back to the dance floor. The crinkling at the corner of his eyes, though older, looked like Tommy again, and the joy Joel felt for him was dulled by the impossibility of ever speaking enough words to draw a partner near. 

“Joel?” she pokes, twanging the elastic a little to jar him. He eyes it warily, expression the most intimidated you'd ever seen him. 

You trudge past Ellie, awkwardly dragging a plastic-encased parcel of a voluminous dress, the best-preserved and least yellowed you’d found. You really didn’t relish the idea of figuring out how to get it on alone, but seeing their exchange, you fully self-preserved your way away from that particular explanation to the changing space.

“Fuck me,” you grimace, noticing the trail of covered buttons leading from the open mid-back to the very last point it could presentably grace between the dimples on your back. Wrestling this on would be a chore.

Before you shuck everything but your boots and socks, you try to smooth your hair down, the moss-flecked mirror of the changing space indicating how hopeless it is. You re-strap your pistol holster to your thigh, an overabundance of caution rubbing off on you from Joel's mere anxious proximity. 

You look at your reflection a minute, appraising heavy breasts, softer hips than before. You’re proud that your abdomen and arms remain taut and toned from a combination of riding and patrolling, sprinting for your life, and helping around Jackson. For once in your life, you fall asleep at night when you hit the pillow, naked and alone, no longer captive of the ceiling’s backlighting of unidentifiable darting thoughts. Blinking your musing away, you remember how your cousin’s bridal attendant had made a circle of the dress for her to step into, and do your best to prepare it so you can slide it up and ask Ellie to help.

—

Ellie slingshotted the something-blue at Joel’s face as he finished explaining the garter tradition, hushing her ferociously and finally placing both palms over his whole face, crossing and re-crossing his ankles where he leant against the counter, rifle over his shoulder. 

Ellie rolled her eyes, haughtily full of recent knowledge of thighs and what they connect to from Cat, fern and moth tattoo freshly peeling over her acid burn. 

—

“Ellie!” you call once the skirt is over your hips, bodice with laced cap sleeves over your shoulders. You feel a little bad stepping past the carefully sewn fabric in your hiking boots and high socks, grimy from the trail’s dust, trying to hold it up while keeping the bodice straight. 

She smiles wryly as her head pokes around the corner.

“I’ll help if you tell me if people really launched their bouquets at people and one person really pulled a—uh, shit, uh, thigh lingerie thing—off of the bride in front of everyone?”

You honk a laugh, a horrible sound, thinking of the velocity with which you’d seen Ellie launch bricks, knowing she has no sense of the soft lob of flowers at friends that she refers to. You guess she's picturing a full-bodied overarm spike ending in flower shrapnel instead of the over-the-shoulder choreography towards the bride's most single friend that happened in reality. You clasp the delicate buttons at your lower back together as best you can with your palms.

“Sounds like that was regionally universal in America, yeah, but—”

“Holy shit,” Ellie comments, suddenly shuddering in a very teenage, possibly exaggerated ripple of disgust. “Looked like a hair tie,” she mutters.

“Just—please help,” you hold the tulle and hand-cut lace near the buttons out to her.

“Wow, this was for everyone to see you in?” Ellie asks, alluding to the sheer fabric that gave the impression that the lace filigrees were directly applied to your skin. Asymmetrical, hand-sewn flowers cinch around your breasts and middle when she finally secures it.

You turn to the angled three-part mirror, noticing where your epaulet tattoo complicates the sheer effect the designers intended by the lace, nose bunching up. Not the flesh of the intended buyer of this thing, for sure.

“Come on, in the light!” Ellie goads gently.

Bracing to self-deprecate, you tuck your hair up in one hand and hold the front of the dress up and away from your muddy boots. You and outward, finding the weird little podium that was apparently customary—you remember your cousin twirling on it a similar one in delight when she’d found the right dress.

“Yeah, fuck, I can’t do this for long,” you bristle, feeling ungainly in the garment, dropping the skirts around your feet.

“And you’d just walk up to someone and kiss them in front of everyone and that worked?” Ellie prattles, tailing you closely.

Joel’s retreated to the store entrance, hunting rifle comfortable in his hands but pointedly ready.

He turns in the middle of running some sort of ten foot patrol route along the length of the store’s entrance, inevitable that he’d face you eventually. You realize he’s just pacing, the town quiet, stuck in a situation he accidentally created.

Ellie gives you a look that looks through you, and you recognize the contemplation in it. She’s thinking of someone, and what formalizing intimacy means, probably. Certainly where your mind was at around her age. Fuck, you’d not go back to sixteen for all the pre-outbreak world.

“I’m gonna go check the horses,” she mumbles, maybe in her own head, maybe more deliberate than that.

Your eyes bulge as you realize you’re stuck in this fucking thing and Ellie’s across the street.

You turn to Joel with a prepared face, tugging your dimples into a self-effacing “look at this shit” face.

“Wanna try one on?” you jab first, trying to get there before Joel can make this worse, more stupid. He’d _kind of_ asked you, or asked for a favor that led to this, so you felt contented blaming him for it. You _definitely_ will if his slight over-caution is vindicated and you get rushed by anything hostile while you're wearing this. Your holster may feel comforting, but the weight of the skirt would put a real drag on any reflexes you had if you actually needed your pistol.

Joel halted at the midpoint of his circling, rifle slack in his hands, hanging limp before him. The light from outside rings his form, broad shoulders and imposing frame worn uneasily in his posture.

His mouth parts the way it had when you’d ridden past him in the stables, chest expanding and falling in quick iterations, hazel eyes stranded on you.

You breathe as you hold his eyes, unable to back down from any time he proved capable of holding direct eye contact. Now that you had it, you realized you’d been teasing it out of him for months, forcing him to look right at you, any creative way you could, driving him up the wall.

Joel might as well have been waist-deep in water for how slowly he moves towards you.

“Sorry, not meaning to bring up anything—” you swallow the word painful, revising quickly, “from before,” you finish weakly. _Gold star, idiot. You had no idea, but what if it had been a wife he’d lost? Fuck’s sake. Though, Ellie wouldn't be cruel like that—_

Joel shakes his head absently, dismissive. He was run aground, captive to taking you in. The dress made no overtures to performative modesty, sheer tulle slits up to the edge of your hipbones, catching on your holster where you shift. Joel assesses the fabric spread over your chest quickly, mouth upturning too subtly for you to feel 100% confident you’d seen him do it. You’d seen him get the lay of a whole horde in a split second, and stood curious what it was he’d noted from the two and a half seconds his eyes drifted over you.

“‘m here, now,” he mumbles, looking down and pulling the bolt back, a dull click as it confirmed he’d chambered this particular round ten times in the last five minutes. If a weapon could sound exasperated with him, it did, and he jerks his head without turning it to Ellie’s retreating form.

Joel’s mind sprints between stations, picking up an artifact of your expression at each one: your body, your easy conversations on patrol, fumbling between them all, not sure where to start.

Ellie wasn’t far enough away for Joel to start this now, to cross the shop and kiss you, podium leveling you to the perfect height for him to lean into, hands on your face. Something in his posture looks ready to move quickly, and it's not to use the weapon his knuckles whiten around. 

The edges of his eyes pinch, like he’s struggling to make sense of an indescribable noise. The tendon running from your ear to collarbone stands out as you look to the side, pretending to appraise the way the dress fits over your hips, snugly buttoned. Joel’s face shifts from startled to starved while you take reprieve from his focus.

Your furrowed brows while you watch Joel watch you spark understanding of the mechanics of a constant, firm draw towards your person. He’s recognizing you as more than a formidable shot he can be at ease with, not just a pleasant confidante with different but complementary pre-outbreak life experiences and a healthy sense of privacy.

Joel glances down one more time, catching your eyes on the way back up as he clears his throat, finding you looking at him sheepishly. He hadn’t tried to say a word in minutes.

“I’m. I’m stuck in here. Ellie—” you stammer, face reddening viciously. This was going to be a long, tiring patrol excursion, and you worried you had already made it weird.

You idly wonder where he might put his hands on you if you were alone, right now, and your terror is visible as the thought drifts by. _If_ he would. 

Joel doesn’t look back at Ellie where you’d normally expect a concerned jolt at her name, hazel eyes heatedly dark. You can chalk it up to the dimmed interior of the shop, but enough sunlight streams in to make you doubt its just the environment.

Grimacing at a clearly out-of-earshot Ellie, you need to be out of this fucking thing and redouble. 

“Joel, can you? I feel bad ripping it and would really like my jeans again,” you offer weakly.

Joel’s fingertips, fingertips you wish you didn’t know were callused and so goddamn cautious when they’d had the occasion to meet yours, flex on his gun.

“Not sure I know how to, I mean, those seem—special?” he stammers at the prospect, you having turned to bare your back to him.

Joel breathes in a way you can hear on the silent street, usually so contained.

_She’s just helping you see the buttons._ Joel thinks, counting out twelve of them, in total.

Joel steadies his gaze, tipping his head forward and choosing to take in the slope of your back, mostly bare and deep-dipping expanse scantly wreathed in lace. His face looks like he’s staring something potentially fatal down, gritted jaw muscles pulsing. He steps towards you, though. He’d never done anything in the right order, not Sarah, not with Tess, not a bit, one single time. Might as well get you dress off before he can even get the courage to kiss you. 

Slinging his rifle’s strap over his shoulder, Joel keeps his fingers at a careful angle, purposefully not against your skin. Pushing the top button through the satin loop containing it, he steps up on the podium with you, only because it puts his lips well out of an easy distance to drag along the nape of your neck. Hoping he can feel his way down the buttons without touching or looking at you, he fails three buttons down, knuckles brushing the bottom of your spine.

You laugh nervously, looking back at Joel. Every part of your core is twining into a spiral, abdomen first, then a layer deeper, then a clench you won’t register because then you’d have to admit that _something was going on._

For his part, his dark brows are furrowed in effort, decidedly back in the realm of watching every movement to avoid the electrocution he’d just experienced from grazing you. Now was the time for accuracy, not speed.

Joel takes in your little cap sleeves between buttons, down to the eighth of twelve. The hand-cut lace outlines your shoulders, leading to lean skin below, dipping lower in the front than he _should_ be noticing now that you’ve turned away from him—but he’s too tall to miss it once you’re standing on level ground. He wonders what you would do if he pulled you against him now, back pressed to his front, his mouth on your neck before your own.

‘Thank you,” Joel says.

You crane your head to meet his eyes again, hands pressed to opposite shoulders to prevent the now-loosened dress from slipping all the way. Maybe you didn’t need the rest of the buttons, but there they went. You blink at him, wondering what would happen if you leaned against him.

“What?” you feel all wrapped in half-fabric, half-suggestion, no idea what the fuck he means.

“For comin’,” he gives. “Didn’t, uh, thanks for…” he trails off, so unaccustomed to indirectness and illocution that he doesn’t know what to call it. He clears his throat.

Joels hits the tenth button and breathes deep, flicking through the last two like he’s reloading, stepping back to reclaim his rifle and get so, so many feet away from you.

You turn to him, holding the weighty dress flush against your skin with both hands.

Joel’s chest is rising and falling every three seconds in rapid cycles, peculiar as you’d patrolled enough together to hear how he can silence his breath, the infrequent draws of someone yards underwater. He either can’t control this or made a choice to stop, and you can only think that the rust colored plaid he’d worn today was truly nice on him.

The rest of your scouting trip is deafeningly quiet, like Joel riding next to you and his surly expression produce volume equivalent to standing under a roaring set of falls. Ellie punctures it every few minutes with an attempted joke and you can almost feel Joel groan before you hear it each time, thoughtful. 

**Author's Note:**

> **Here's the meta you didn't ask for**
> 
> In current 2020, hard to see in weddings as anything other than class signifiers/routes to wife-n’ up, but: 
> 
> holy shit does the apocalypse , esp. Tommy’s hope-imperative thing, make room for meaningfully coded rituals and aspirational ideologies not hijacked by the wedding industry’s profit motive. 
> 
> Joel’s coming from the context of a wife who left Joel alone because having Sarah ruined her young life, so his view of it is understandably dismissive. Reader was more interesting to make opposite—college-aged asshole without responsibilities on Outbreak Day, less room for traditions. 
> 
> But: Jackson is frozen in time and CRAVES ritual. Where it was meaningless in a world of abundance, you need markers of the years and ways to say “that person is my person;" it's joy as resistance.
> 
> For instance, something about Christmas hits different when you’re not fist fighting consumers for prelit trees after scuttling past a Salvation Army Santa in a mall. Jackson feels so sincere, every decoration scavenged or hewn with love, with purpose and forethought. 
> 
> There’s joy in scarcity and glut in abundance is my point, I guess. Joel gets that on a basic level, even though he’s obstinate as hell about letting himself have anything good or even open to the idea.


End file.
